Turning crisis into care: A Korczak-inspired approach to Jewish youth education

Editor’s Note: This article appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy on May 1, 2026.

As the war between Israel and Iran was heating up, I scrolled by a tweet by the Mumbai-based political commentator and blogger Maitreya Bhakal: “People need to stop saying that Iran is targeting civilians in Israel. There are no civilians in Israel.” Twenty-two thousand people liked his idea. My mind went immediately to the children who had been injured by Iranian missiles. No civilians? Honestly, this made my blood boil.  

For all of us who know and love Israelis and have felt concern about their safety over the last few months, this type of tweet, which claims that all people are legitimate targets in war, is dangerous, frustrating and, sadly, becoming more common. Applying this type of thinking is wrong against Israel, against Iran, against Gazans or anyone else for that matter. Have we not learned from history? Are we really at the point when children are no longer innocent? 

I am a Jewish educator who does a lot of work with Jewish teens, particularly with teens who work as teachers or counselors for younger children. One source of great inspiration for me is the life and work of Dr. Janus Korczak.

In my teen years, during my first visit to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, our guide told us about the Jewish orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto and Korczak, its director, who accompanied his young charges to Treblinka. It was a powerful story. It was powerful because we were a group of teens having the time of our lives, and they were a group of orphans, many of them teens, who had been through tragedy —  now about to be murdered by fascists. 

The fact that Korczak accompanied them to their death was also a powerful act of both courage and martyrdom. The spiritual message of the story, as I understood it, was that in extreme circumstances, an educator must not abandon the children for whom they are responsible. It was akin to the maritime tradition of “The captain goes down with the ship.” And it was one story that helped me wrap my teen head around the horror that even as over a million Jewish children were murdered during the Shoah, at least one teacher cared enough to be present as a witness.   

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Rabbi Daniel Brenner serves as the vice president of education for Moving Traditions. He is currently writing a book about parent-child relationships and, in his spare time, he studies and teaches shtetl dance.